BioWar Lab Helping To Develop Treatment For Ebola

A top U.S. biological-warfare unit is developing a treatment for the deadly Ebola virus and could have it in the field within two years.

The virus, which has killed more than 800 people in West Africa as of August 4, is a “Category A Bioterrorism Agent” along with anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague and smallpox, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Coming up with countermeasures for Ebola and its closest relative, the Marburg virus, “is a top biodefense priority for the United States,” said Colonel Erin Edgar, the commanding officer of the Fort Detrick, Maryland, bio-war unit.

Scientists have to wear pressurised, spacesuit-like protective gear and breathe filtered air when working with the bug.

The new drug, BCX4430, works by blocking the reproduction of the virus inside infected cells.

Chemically, it is similar to adenosine, one of the four letters of the genetic code.

But when the virus tries to build new copies of itself using BCX4430 instead of adenosine, the process comes to a grinding halt.

Crucially, the infected cells can tell the difference between the two molecules and ignore the drug.

Bio-warfare unit USAMRIID at Fort Detrick, MD (Credit: Wikipedia)

Scientists told Forbes.com that BCX4430 was a “nuke”, short for “nucleocide”, a class of drugs that also includes treatments for HIV.

It has been tested on mice, curing more than 90 per cent of them in trials reported in the respected scientific journal Nature earlier this year.

The drug was also tested on crab-eating macaque monkeys against Marburg with a similar success rate.

Both viruses cause haemorrhagic fever, which typically kills up to 90 per cent of patients, says the World Health Organisation.

The scientists working on BCX4430 are optimistic that the drug will prove effective against Ebola in humans because it is a “wide spectrum” agent, with evidence that it could also work against SARS and Yellow Fever.

The drug was first synthesised by BioCryst Pharmaceuticals at its lab in Birmingham, Alabama, during research into treatments for Hepatitis C.

But early in-vitro trials showed that “the molecule is active against a panel of nasty bugs,” BioCryst vice-president Robert Bennett told Forbes.com.

The next step will be to measure its effectiveness against Ebola in monkeys during experiments planned for next year.

Armed with those trials, plus safety tests on human volunteers, the team could apply for fast-track approval under the U.S. Federal Drug Administration’s “Animal Rule” procedure.

This could put it into the hands of doctors by the end of 2016.

“We’re going absolutely as fast as we can,” BioCryst’s Dr Bill Sheridan, co-leader of the research team, told Forbes.com. “If we replicate what we’ve seen so far, there’s a pretty good shot of the drug being helpful in humans.”

Currently, there is no cure, treatment, or vaccine for either Ebola or Marburg.

Since the disease affects relatively few, mostly poor people, it has attracted little attention from big pharmaceutical companies. The BCX4430 research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which is also supporting separate trials of a vaccine against the disease and other related research.

The outbreak of Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia is the worst since the disease was identified in 1976.